A Long Overdue Blog Post

Maybe no one else has been wondering why I haven’t posted a blog post in over a month… but I sure have. Sorry, this is long overdue. I kept telling myself to write something, but the longer I waited, the more there was to cover and the harder that seemed to be to put into words! Just a little update, currently I am in New Zealand traveling with a friend, but tomorrow we will be headed home (well, to Hawaii) for Thanksgiving!

This blog post will cover our two weeks at sea after Suva, Fiji in route to Auckland, New Zealand. 

Firstly, my dang first post for S.E.A’s blog that I mentioned before never got posted. I copied it to my computer and wanted to share it anyway, so here it is:

Date: October 14, 2014

Current Position: 14° 17.8’S x 178° 09.6’W

Course and Speed: Docked in Leava, Futuna

Sail Plan: Docked

Weather: Rainy, often with torrential downpours

     Well well well. Today we did in fact meet the King. Futuna has two kingdoms, one is Alo and the other is Segevai. We, as a class, got to meet the King of Alo.  Honestly, I had no idea what we were doing and I don’t think anyone else did either. It ended up being one of the driest yet most interesting meetings we’ve had: the term “language barrier” doesn’t really hit you until you’ve sat in a room for an hour being spoken to in two different languages you don’t understand— while having an inkling that you aren’t necessarily being welcomed to their community. In the end, it turns out the King just wanted to speak with us first, before we proceeded with our visit to Futuna. We were officially welcomed to Futuna and also invited by one of the people at this meeting to another Communion ceremony tonight.

     After the meeting, we were taken around to a variety of stops including a taro farm, archeological sites, and the ocean-side dumpsite for Futuna! Once we got back to the ship, a large group of us decided to trek to the post office to try and contact family and friends via 10 minutes of free wifi. The rain was crazy, but this time we were prepared with our heavy duty rain jackets.

    Later today, we were picked up yet again in some breezy and wet pick-up trucks to be taken to another Communion ceremony. When we showed up, our feelings as students were basically like the night before, including: we’re so out place, there aren’t any other women sitting under the fale, we look ridiculous in these neon rain jackets, just smile and drink the kava, etc. Tonight, the gathering was much larger, probably around 150 people. As seems to be the trend with these sorts of ceremonies, it began with various different leaders of the community speaking at length in their native tongue and French. Then as usual the, not so yummy, kava root drink was passed out in coconut shells by various members of the community. Soon after, the festivities truly began: the live band started and friendly people asked you to dance. As I sit here writing this blog post, I listen to all my friends here aboard the Seamans exclaim how much fun they had tonight. It was truly something I will never forget. It was an amazing chance for us to be fully immersed into their community. Whether that was dance with any sort of person (including the King!), sing with everyone, play instruments with the guys in the back, eat food prepared by the women, or simply talk to the Futuna people— it was a night to remember. Personally, one of the greatest parts was watching the men dance together. Coming from a dance background, I loved watching every little movement within the dance. For my dance friends back home, you would have so much appreciated the isolation and intensity in their every move… even when many were probably 60+ years old!

      As far as life of the ship, I’d like to just leave you with this little pie chart of a poll I took of 5 of the “biggest struggles” we face aboard the Seamans. My favorite is cleaning the galley mats. Just imagine extremely heavy rubber mats that without a doubt always leave you a mess. The winner, however, seems to be the evil bunk fan placement. You just never are quite able to reach every little section of your tropical sweating body. 

Our funny struggles aboard the Seamans.

 The Communion Ceremony. Music to the left, dancing to the right, us in the middle wearing our beautiful leis.

 P.S. I would love to send a big aloha to you Mom! Also, love and hella miss you Rox, Mark, every inch of my family/friends, da Delta kids, my sweeties, and Haluan! Love you to infinity Dad, a hui hou.

Lauren Korth, A-Watch, UC Santa Cruz

So there you have it, finally! Alright back to the topic at hand, our two weeks at sea! Where to begin…

Pretty quickly as we took off from Fiji, the seas came back to us in full force. After each port stop we usually had a meeting with everyone except a few people on deck. For this meeting about Fiji, a very memorable one in fact (if you remember, ask me for details later), people started dropping like flies. Being docked in Fiji for almost a week, a lot of people lost their sea legs and had to leave our meeting to go up on deck to “give back” a little to Neptune. There is no puking in the comfort of the heads (bathrooms) on the ship. In case anyone was wondering, I only threw up once, and I can’t even remember when it was, but it was seasickness that literally lasted 5 minutes… so strange. Almost everyone on board took seasick meds throughout the trip, including myself. Some people were sick for basically the entire trip, some never, and some got better as they got used to being at sea. 

I guess I should tell you a little bit more about how life onboard works. All of us students (who are considered part of the ship’s crew) were split into three watch groups, A, B and C Watch. 'A' watch was the best, of course.

A Watch. Left to right: Hugh, Laura (our scientist), Will (chief mate), me,  Bryn, Rebeca, LP (our deckhand), Holly, and Kate at the bottom

Since the ship is traveling and a research vessel 24/7 we have watch times 24/7. There is morning watch (7am-1pm), afternoon watch (1pm-7pm), evening watch (7pm-11pm), mid-watch (11pm-3am), and dawn watch (3am-7am). During these watches, you are either on deck making sure the ship sails along safely (navigation, line handling, maintenance and steering mainly) or in lab (doing science! Such as counting zooplankton, filtering chlorophyll A samples, helping with hydrocasts, etc.)

Hugh and I modeling the carousel used in hydrocasts

Each student helps as an assistant steward in the galley at least once during the trip, and sometimes you can be assistant engineer! Each of our watch groups rotated through these watch times every day… so some days were better than others. Such as, if you got mid-watch you then had “the King’s Sleep" because you could sleep the rest of the night and not get up until a little before 1pm. Originally we were so tired, so we'd all just go sleep, but then we got used to it and realized how much fun stuff you could be doing during the day. And fun could be a number of things:

~journaling 

~crafting (some people made pouches/iPad covers/wallets from old sail scraps, I made jewelry, and some made Turk’s heads)

~catching up on your sheet anchor (a journal of notes for Nautical Science and future reference for those of us hoping to become deckhands or something one day!)

~writing postcards

~look at cool new things in science (such as from different net tows during lab)

~try and catch some fish off the stern

~play an instrument

~pretend to dance in your head (well this probably was just me)

~listen to music (with one earphone in only!)

~work on one of your papers…. 

~chill out in your bunk

~learn to use the sextant

~go on the head rig, which was one of my favorites:

A watch on the head rig

~and finally, once each person in your watch group completed the “aloft safety checklist” we could go aloft! 'A' watch was of course the first to get all of ours done ;) the watch groups were a little competitive...

Now all this might make it seem glorious and a breeze…. but it was exhausting. Part of this was because a lot of our time was spent cleaning the ship. Every time you had dawn watch, you would eat breakfast after and then have to do “DC” (dawn cleanup) of the entire ship. It was always nice to find your way back to your bunk and sleep sleep sleep. Once a week we would also have a thorough clean of the ship during “field day”. 'A' watch was in charge of galley cleanup, which consisted of clearing almost everything out to be cleaned on deck and then cleaning every surface of the galley. Oh man this was tough when we were in the tropics… but by the end I didn’t mind it too much. Field Day’s saving grace was that we could play music out loud and our steward handed out candy. 

On the 28th of October, I was the assistant steward. I was scared-- and I let our steward know. Some of you may know this already, but I don’t cook… like at all. So feeding 35 people was a little daunting. The good part about being assistant steward is that you get a full night sleep the night before and after. It was a long day but it ended up going pretty well! The best part was that our steward used my recipe for my mom’s breakfast fried rice. It was a little taste of home in the middle of the Pacific! That day we also went aloft! Turns out… although you have a harness on, you aren’t clipped into anything until you get to the top. Basically, you just don’t let go. Not going to lie, it was a little scary at first, but wow was it awesome! Seeing the ship from that view was truly breathtaking.

The 30th of October will go down as the most beautiful day I’ve ever seen. I don’t remember much else from the day except that we worked on memorizing the pin rails (where each of the sail lines is tied off and their names). Now, okay, this day was a terrible sailing day because there was no wind… butttt I’m just going to let the pictures speak: 

'A' Watch after studying the pins

As for Halloween, I wrote the class blog that day so I’m just going to leave the link for it: http://www.sea.edu/sea_currents/robert_c_seamans/happy_halloween_from_s255     But please read it if you haven’t already… it’s a good story!

On the 5th of November, while I was plotting our position in the Dog House, I heard a person with a new accent on the radio… it was the New Zealand Coastguard! It was a cool moment to know we’d been sailing to New Zealand this whole time, and finally it was in reach. We started seeing islands off the coast as well that night. 

On the 6th of November, A watch had dawn watch, which was pretty awesome because it was the morning we pulled into Auckland! Besides this, it was probably one of the most memorable watches. The days leading up to it had been increasingly colder, but this night and morning took the cake-- getting down to 10 degrees Celsius. I literally had 7 layers of shirts/jackets on and 4 pairs of pants and leggings. Burr. Anyway that night I relieved our deckhand from lookout on the bow (something we do at night and coming in and out of port… pretty tough to stand there with only your thoughts), and not even 5 minutes later I heard a noise in the water. I looked out in the moonlit ocean and saw something… soon enough what I thought it might be came true. DOLPHINS!!! It was glorious. I nearly cried. It was such a great ending to an amazing journey. There they were, at least 5 dolphins, gliding through the water and riding the waves by our bow. They looked like ghosts going through the water with us in the moonlight. Something I will remember forever. However, after that, shit got real (pardon my language). The wind picked up as we got closer to Auckland and it was still reallllly cold. Short story, we made it. WE SAILED TO NEW ZEALAND. 

Members of B watch as we were about to dock in Auckland

It was definitely surreal arriving in Auckland— knowing it was almost over was difficult to take. A lot of us wish we could have kept sailing for at least another week. We just felt like we were getting into the groove of things. So hopefully one day we’ll be back on the Seamans! 

Stay tuned for the next blog about the end of our semester…. (I promise it will be shorter).